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Nexus 1.3.0 Released

We are pleased to announce the 1.3.0 release of both Nexus Open Source and Nexus Professional. Nexus has reached a level of maturity where we can start focusing on refining the UI experience and testing the system for edge case stability. With the Nexus 1.3 release, we continue to make subtle changes to the Plugin API design that will allow the community to create even more compelling plugins and features. New Features in the 1.3.0 release:

Select Mirrors for Proxy Repositories – Nexus now consumes metadata from a repository that lists mirrors. Using the new 1.3.0 interface, you can tell Nexus to retrieve artifacts from a list of mirrors. Nexus will retrieve checksums and POM information from the original (or canonical) repository URL, but it will transfer artifacts from a list of configurable mirrors.

Manage Mirrors for Hosted Repositories – If your Hosted repository is mirrored, you can populate a list of known mirrors which will be exposed to other systems which consume your repository.

Consolidated Repository Management Screens – Nexus now has tabbed interfaces for repository management. Prior to this release, to administer a repository, one would click on Repositories or Groups under an Administration menu. With 1.3.0, all you need to do to manage a repository, is login as an Administrative user and view a repository. If you have the appropriate privileges, you will see a Configuration and Mirrors tab in addition to the Browse tab. This context-sensitive customization of the user interface based on privileges and roles is going to provide for a more scalable approach as we expand the Nexus feature set over time.

Force Base URL – Nexus tries, as best it can, to use a URL created from the elements of a web request, but there are times when you want to force a specific Base URL to be used in a web response. This could be for any number of reasons, if you are trying to ensure that Nexus uses an https scheme, or if you are running into confusing problems running behind something like mod_proxy you may want to set Force Base URL to true.

More Search Fields – You can now search by artifact classifier. If you are looking for a specific zip, jar, or swc, you can populate the classifier field in the Nexus GAV search (I guess it should really be called GAVC search?)

Easy Mapping of External Roles to Nexus Roles – If you are using Nexus with an external authentication and authorization realm (like the LDAP integration in Nexus Pro), it is now much easier to map an external role to a Nexus role. For example, using the Nexus 1.3 interface, you can easily specify that every user in a particular LDAP group named “svn” should be able to have a specific Nexus role.

Fine-grained Log Configuration – This release gives you more control of logging. Administrators can control the format and level of the Nexus log. If you want to see detailed debugging messages, or if you want to change the format of each log line, click on Log under the Administration menu.

More System Feeds Available – Nexus 1.3 separates feeds for recently deployed, recently changed, and recently cached artifacts and files, and authorization events.

Access to more Logs and Configuration Files from Nexus Interface – In Nexus 1.3 you can view the contents of more than just the nexus.log and the nexus.xml files. Nexus allows administrators to peruse the contents of supporting configuration files like staging.xml, procurement.xml, and log4j.properties form the Nexus UI interface.

Automatic Notification of Available Updates – Nexus will now be able to notify you of an available update. Sonatype views this as less of a convenience feature than a security feature. As we improve Nexus, you will be able to keep up with the progress as soon as a new release is cut.

Some changes to Nexus components which might not be immediately visible:

Changes to the Nexus Index Format – Prior to the 1.3 release, the format of the Nexus index was specific to the version of Lucene used to generate it. With this release, we have “future proofed” the format of this index and we’re storing the index in a format that can be read by all future versions of the Nexus Indexer. It is also able to consume incremental index updates.

Changes to the Plugin API – We’ve continued to adapt the plugin API to the needs of the community.

Some defects fixed in the 1.3 release:

Various usability and UI defects which were uncovered by our rigorous testing. During the 1.3 release cycle, the Nexus development team took care to identify UI elements that might be confusing or misleading.

Some small timing issues related to index locking when running a reindex. This release increases stability and works out some esoteric timing conditions. Sonatype’s testing experts pushed Nexus to the limit and spent some time putting Nexus into strange exception states to make sure that the software was running on a solid core.